Azeem Azhar's Exponential View
Dec 23, 2024 · 51 min · 13 segments
Dylan Patel, founder of SemiAnalysis and one of my go-to experts on semiconductors and data center infrastructure joins me to discuss AI in 2025. Several key themes emerged about where AI might be…
Azeem AzharHostUm, but the, the interesting thing is you also have to think about what is each person's, um, motivations for their statements.
Um, You know, Amazon is just getting started, right? Like, you know, if you look back a year ago, they were woefully behind.
And today they're still woefully behind, right? Their new models are still like very much not even top five in the world, right? You know, but as like the leading cloud company, they should be in that top five, but they're not.
The level of scaling that they want, they're going to spend all of the money that they just raised, the $6 billion equity and $4 billion debt, in like a year and a half.
right, if they want to really get that money and then start committing to even more compute.
And then lastly, you have Sundar, who I think they're still in release paralysis.
So I think it's interesting that they say it's only incremental from here, given they still haven't even gotten to the top.
As far as who's right, I think it's closer to Sam or Sundar, or sorry, Sam or Bezos, because we are just getting started in AI, right? These scaling on many different vectors, whether it be synthetic data, whether it be compute, whether it be push training, whether it be reasoning, whether it be AI infrastructure and inference rollout, all of this has just started.
Right, and what you've just described there reminds me of the Charlie Munger quote, which is, show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome.
And these three different leaders have got different incentives to give us a particular answer, as you say, sort of Sam has to exponentiate and continues to do so in order to keep raising.
So you say, and I believe I also agree with that, that we are just getting started, that it's easy to mistake turbulence on the journey for the plane not getting to its destination.
And of course, engineering of new products of this scale is bound to hit roadblocks.
When we talk about exponential growth, right, and we think about what's happening with these AI models, there's lots of exponentials going on.
Um, but the, the interesting thing is you also have to think about what is each person's, um, motivations for their statements.
Um, You know, Amazon is just getting started, right? Like, you know, if you look back a year ago, they were woefully behind.
And today they're still woefully behind, right? Their new models are still like very much not even top five in the world, right? You know, but as like the leading cloud company, they should be in that top five, but they're not.
The level of scaling that they want, they're going to spend all of the money that they just raised, the $6 billion equity and $4 billion debt, in like a year and a half.
right, if they want to really get that money and then start committing to even more compute.
And then lastly, you have Sundar, who I think they're still in release paralysis.
So I think it's interesting that they say it's only incremental from here, given they still haven't even gotten to the top.
As far as who's right, I think it's closer to Sam or Sundar, or sorry, Sam or Bezos, because we are just getting started in AI, right? These scaling on many different vectors, whether it be synthetic data, whether it be compute, whether it be push training, whether it be reasoning, whether it be AI infrastructure and inference rollout, all of this has just started.
Right, and what you've just described there reminds me of the Charlie Munger quote, which is, show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome.
And these three different leaders have got different incentives to give us a particular answer, as you say, sort of Sam has to exponentiate and continues to do so in order to keep raising.
So you say, and I believe I also agree with that, that we are just getting started, that it's easy to mistake turbulence on the journey for the plane not getting to its destination.
And of course, engineering of new products of this scale is bound to hit roadblocks.
When we talk about exponential growth, right, and we think about what's happening with these AI models, there's lots of exponentials going on.
The rest of this transcript — segmented and speaker-labeled, so you land on the exact moment something was said
Search every transcript — by keyword, by phrase, or by meaning, across every show Radar indexes
Trends — what is surging across podcasts, measured against its own baseline
Alerts — when a name you follow appears in a newly indexed episode
No account is needed to search Radar.